• The Trials And Tribulations Of IBM Systems

    July 19, 2017

    IBM is a bit of an enigma these days. It has the art – some would say black magic – of financial engineering down pat, and its system engineering is still quite good. Big Blue talks about all of the right things for modern computing platforms, although it speaks a slightly different dialect because the company still thinks that it is the one setting the pace, and therefore coining the terms, rather than chasing markets that others are blazing. And it just can’t seem to grow revenues, even after tens of billions of dollars in acquisitions and internal investments over …

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  • Giving Out Grades For Exascale Efforts

    June 27, 2017

    Just by being the chief architect of the IBM’s BlueGene massively parallel supercomputer, which was built as part of a protein folding simulation grand challenge effort undertaken by IBM in the late 1990s, Al Gara would be someone whom the HPC community would listen to whenever he spoke. But Gara is now an Intel Fellow and also chief exascale architect at Intel, which has emerged as the second dominant supplier of supercomputer architectures alongside Big Blue’s OpenPower partnership with founding members Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Google.

    It may seem ironic that Gara did not stay around IBM to help this …

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  • Thinking Through The Cognitive HPC Nexus With Big Blue

    June 21, 2017

    There are plenty of things that the members of the high performance community do not agree on, there is a growing consensus that machine learning applications will at least in some way be part of the workflow at HPC centers that do traditional simulation and modeling.

    Some HPC vendors think the HPC and AI systems have either already converged or will soon do so, and others think that the performance demands (both in terms of scale and in time to result) on both HPC and AI will necessitate radically different architectures and therefore distinct systems for these two workloads. IBM, …

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  • International Cognitive And Cloud Business Machines

    April 20, 2017

    International Business Machines has gone through so many changes in its eleven decades of existence, and it is important to remember that some days. If IBM’s recent changes are a bit bewildering, as they were in the late 1980s, the middle 1990s, and the early 2010s in particular, they are perhaps nothing compared the changes that were wrought to transform a maker of meat slicers, time clocks, and tabulating equipment derived from looms.

    Yeah, and you thought turning GPUs into compute engines was a stretch.

    Herman Hollerith, who graduated from Columbia University in 1879 when its engineering school was still …

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  • Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business

    April 20, 2017

    Chip maker Intel is getting out of the business of trying to make money with a commercially supported release of the high-end Lustre parallel file system. Lustre is commonly used at HPC centers and is increasingly deployed by enterprises to take on their biggest file system jobs.

    But don’t jump too far to any other conclusions. The core development and support team, minus a few key people who have already left, remains at Intel and will be working on Lustre for the foreseeable future.

    Intel quietly announced its plans to shutter its Lustre commercialization efforts in a posting earlier this …

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  • From Mainframes to Deep Learning Clusters: IBM’s Speech Journey

    April 7, 2017

    Here at The Next Platform, we tend to focus on deep learning as it relates to hardware and systems versus algorithmic innovation, but at times, it is useful to look at the co-evolution of both code and machines over time to see what might be around the next corner.

    One segment of the deep learning applications area that has generated a great deal of work is in speech recognition and translation—something we’ve described in detail via efforts from Baidu, Google, Tencent, among others. While the application itself is interesting, what is most notable is how codes …

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  • Server Makers Try To Adapt To A Harsher Climate

    March 2, 2017

    So, who was the biggest revenue generator, and showing the largest growth in sales, for servers in the final quarter of 2016? Was it Hewlett Packard Enterprise? Was it Dell Technologies? Was it IBM or Cisco Systems or one of the ODMs? Nope. It was the Others category comprised of dozens of vendors that sit outside of the top tier OEMs we know by name and the collective ODMs of the world who some of us know by name.

    This is a sign that the server ecosystem is getting more diverse under pressure as the technical and economic climate changes …

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  • IBM Wants to Make Mainframes Next Platform for Machine Learning

    February 15, 2017

    Despite the emphasis on X86 clusters, large public clouds, accelerators for commodity systems, and the rise of open source analytics tools, there is a very large base of transactional processing and analysis that happens far from this landscape. This is the mainframe, and these fully integrated, optimized systems account for a large majority of the enterprise world’s most critical data processing for the largest companies in banking, insurance, retail, transportation, healthcare, and beyond.

    With great memory bandwidth, I/O, powerful cores, and robust security, mainframes are still the supreme choice for business-critical operations at many Global 1000 companies, even if the …

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  • The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox

    February 7, 2017

    We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass.

    It is with this in mind, and as more of a thought experiment than a desire, that we consider the fate of International Business Machines in the datacenter. In many ways, other companies have long …

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  • IBM Reorg Forges Cognitive Systems, Merges Cloud And Analytics

    January 24, 2017

    It is the first month of a new year, and this is the time that IBM traditionally does reorganizations of its business lines and plays musical chairs with its executives to reconfigure itself for the coming year. And just like clockwork, late last week the top brass at Big Blue did internal announcements explaining the changes it is making to transform its wares into a platform better suited to the times.

    The first big change, and one that may have precipitated all of the others that have been set in place, is Robert LeBlanc, who is the senior vice president …

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